Having recently bought tickets for night trains Paris-Venice & Venice-Nice I have just been checking over the Thomas Cook International European railway & boat timetable, which I find fascinating. Every night while I & most sensible people are asleep, dozens of trains are crossing Europe, mostly with couchettes/beds, some with seats for the cheaper tickets. Every night. Sometimes a train splits into two in the middle of the night - with different destinations. Sometimes two trains meet somewhere at 5.00am & become one for the rest of their journey. (Venice to Nice splits & some carriages go to Zurich, then later it joins the train from Rome).

But none of these trains start at London St. Pancras International & use the tunnel. (There are some night sleeper trains from London to Scotland & Cornwall).

Years ago in pre-tunnel days, there was a night train from London to Paris. I used it twice. You had to get off at Dover & walk to the boat, & then back on the train

in France, in Dunkerque or Calais. In 1978 I was wandering around on the boat and was amazed to find a train on the boat. Yes the first class sleeper carriage went all the way from London to Paris so these folk could enjoy an undisturbed sleep. That's all gone now of course, but why not have through night sleepers from London to, say, Barcelona, or Nice, or Munich? Paris & other cities in continental Europe have a history of these services, but London doesn't so maybe it would take a good marketing campaign and/or a huge hike in air fares to bring this about.

As far as I am aware, none of the night services in Europe are high speed. Why is this? I am guessing that...
1 it would need specially adapted trains;
2 there may be speed restrictions at night in many places;
3 it may require a lot of co-ordination among railway companies (especially if it involved eurostar); &
4 the high speed network is still in its infancy, when it gets bigger it may become feasible to run night services on high speed trains going much further than the regular night services do now.

Sorry if this bores you to tears. My wife finds it odd that I can sit down & actually enjoy reading the railway timetable, it must be the little boy still inside me.

It's 2 hours London to Paris from where you can get sleeper traisn to most of Europe

See www.seat61.com

As to why there aren't any high speed trains

a) don't want people falling out of bed
b) what's the use of a train that arrives at 3:00am - may as well save the effort and get there for 7:00am when things are opening

I'm not aware of any highspeed train system in the world that's run around the clock. Even the Shinkansen in Japan shuts down from around midnight to 5 or 6am.

They need that time for track maintenance.

There is also not that much track through Europe suitable for high speed trains yet.
Eurostar run trains to skiing destinations occasionally in winter, but mostly just stick to Paris and Brussels.

The services you're suggesting don't just need specially adapted trains: they need completely specialised trains. And in the case of trains involving the Channel Tunnel, they need special security and passport arrangements at the non-London end. At tiny stations like Moutiers, it's reasonbly easy to arrange security for one or two trains a week full of passengers going to London: it would be extremely complicated (which means expensive) to do so at big stations like Nice. Just look at the effort that's gone into creating a secure area at the Gare du Nord.

It's inconceivable in our lifetime that the security environment will ever allow trains through the Channel Tunnel to be treated the same way as trains from Paris to Munich. The result is that Europ;e's railway companies have looked at long-distance trains from London and decided they simply can't justify the investment - especially since none of the routes you suggest get much traffic. None of your suggested cities are serious financial or business centres.

I don't understand your point about airfares. What drives airfares up drives trainfares up in almost exactly the same way. What would stimulate investment in the cacilities for trains to Frankfurt or Amsterdam would be government intervention to skew the market in favour of low-pollutant transport - or, some might say, to remove the absurd subsidy airlines receive.

The British government alone can't do this. The problem lies in the international treaties that allow aviation fuel to escape taxation. And that's a subject beyond even the EU's control.

What's Hillary and Obama's stance on fuel tax?

The London to Glasgow still does a good night service but the London to Manchester stops in Birmingham for a few hours rest in a siding (My boss did this one recently after a concert in London and woke up in the siding and tried to get off)

Eurostar planned to run overnight services, and sleeping cars were built. Journeys were planned from the north of England to Paris, or from London to Frankfurt, amongst others. The project was dropped as it wasn't expected to make money. The sleeping cars, I believe, were sold to Canada.
It is possible to make overnight journeys from Britain to the continent, for instance to the Netherlands by using the overnight ferries from Harwich, Hull or Newcastle. Accommodation is much more spacious than on overnight trains, and the ships make money by carrying cars and trucks.
There is no technical reason why high-speed overnight trains could not be built. Paris-Roma would be an obvious journey where the current overnight service is too lengthy, but the reality is that overnight trains are struggling to compete with the airlines. I'm a great fan of overnight trains, but I'm in a minority.

Last i knew the Eurostar Sleeper trains that were meant to do London-Continental overnight routes were sitting on a siding at North Pole near Paddington, never used.

I believe they have been subsequently sold off however, never having run.

The St Pancras-French Alps ski trains are i believe just regular trains with seats.

The Nightstar sleeper trainsets were sold to VIA Rail of Canada. They're running between Toronto and Montreal, and east to Halifax.

Thanks for all your comments so far & also helpful corrections to my erroneous thinking. Flanneruk I take your points about fares + security. It has long annoyed me that airlines get tax-free fuel but trains don't. My son lives in Ontario, so perhaps I'll see the eurostar sleeper wannabes next time I'm over there. Mind you hardly anyone I met in Canada last year had ever been on a train there!
Meanwhile I'll just dream about an end to security problems and improving the quality of (even regular) rail travel